Excellent, fresh-tasting orange juice (even as it nears its sell-by date) (Innocent Orange Juice)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Innocent Orange Juice
Date:	16/09/09 (27 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tastes like juice from real oranges you've squeezed yourself; no fake after-taste or nasty 'tang'

Disadvantages: Ordinarily, is slightly too pricey

While I like the 'Innocent' brand range of fruit juice and smoothie drinks in principle, I think that £3 a carton (and if memory serves, a litre of their strawberry and banana smoothie drink currently retails at about £2.89) is far too much to pay for a fruit drink that, erm, doesn't have any alcohol in it.

They did, however have an 'Innocent' product in the marked-down for quick sale section at Tesco's yeterday and so I bought a litre of their orange juice with bits in it for the knock-down price of £1.39. Ordinarily a single carton like this would've set me back £1.89, though Tesco are currently running a 'buy two cartons for three quid' offer.

Initially I wasn't sure about the el-cheapo-looking mainly white, cardboard / tetrapack packaging that the Innocent drink came in; I do occasionally buy 'premuim' citrus drinks from supermarkets (mainly when they're marked down in price, obviously) and for this much money I would usually expect my drink to come in a slightly heavy-duty clear plastic rounded bottle with a posh 'Finest' label on it; one of those ones with a gold-plastic screw-cap that has surprisingly good tread on it, that seems almost robust enough for you to consider keeping longer-term and refilling with other stuff. (But it's a silly preference on balance because the Innocent packaging did the job perfectly well and I never do end up keeping and reusing those sorts of bottles anyway.)

The real relevation with this stuff was that the quality of the orange juice inside was - even considering that what I bought was on the cusp of passing its sell by date - absolutely outstanding. Compared to the other premium bransds of orange juice I've been buying lately this was head-and-shoulders above all the rest; in comparison, the bottle of 'Tesco Finest' orange juice I had most recently was for example acrid and harsh-tasting, with an unpleasantly bitter tang of orange oil / zest. The Innocent drink on the other hand tasted like it'd just been squeezed from actual, real oranges - and it tasted as if the oranges used to make it had been gently squeezed, at that - rather than being wrung out in desperation for the extraction of every last drop of liquid. The Innocent juice's texture was smooth and nicely-flowing, and the 'bits' of fruit, rather than being fibrous and liable to clog your mouth slipped down nicely and were very drinkable. Probably because there were fewer 'bits' overall, they also seemed 'suspended' in the drink more effectively than you find with other, orange-pulp-heavy brands; so it wasn't necessary to shake the bottle violently to distribute them from a settled layer at the bottom.

I'd give this product 10/10 for quality of the product, and even the price - considering the current Tesco two for £3 offer, would not be too much of a deterrent against my buying this again.

Summary: Top-class fresh orange juice, with or without bits